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It's ironic how AI companies are re-inventing their own form of privately enforced copyright, lobby the government to ban foreign competitors that don't respect
by cornholio 2mo ago
It's ironic how AI companies are re-inventing their own form of privately enforced copyright, lobby the government to ban foreign competitors that don't respect it etc., all while spending the last 5 years fighting tooth and nail against the copyright of the training material they're using.
If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.
They tied themselves into knots fighting the letter of the law, and now, when they need the spirit of the law - that each creator deserves protection for their work - now we devolve to the law of the jungle. Maybe we'll even see LLM book curses, the way medieval scribes damned book thieves to blindness and worms.
- jimbob45 2mo agoAre you willing to denounce each and every Chinese company for equal amounts of IP theft as well then?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- alightsoul 2mo agoThey already are? When an American company does it no one cares but when a Chinese company does it, it's shamed publicly in America as a distillation attack?
- lmm 2mo agoOnly any who hypocritically want protection for their own models (are there any?). The morality of scraping everyone is arguable; it's when you object to being scraped back that you reveal yourself as a scoundrel.
- mstade 2mo agoYes. Two wrongs do not make a right.
- nixon_why69 2mo agoIf the results of the distillation are released freely for everyone to download, I wouldn't even call it a wrong. Big models are built by scraping the recorded thoughts of everyone, so giving everyone a chance to run a distilled small model is just going full circle. Obviously the underlying motivations aren't 100% altruistic, but I'll still take it.
- trollbridge 2mo agoNope, because I think releasing open weights is far more important and realistic than ever expecting the big American AI labs to change how they do things.
- dannyw 2mo agoCompanies are well within their rights to choose who they sell to. I don't see how this is 'privately enforced copyright'. Also, copyright has always been privately enforced anyway?
- oblio 2mo agoDMCA? Which is actually an American law enforced globally? Enforcement ultimately happens through law and the legal system.
- oblio 2mo agoDownvoters: am I wrong or do you just not like what I'm saying?
- dannyw 2mo agoI consider publicly enforced to be one where a government agency (e.g. the FDA), or prosecutors make judgements in what cases they file, make the arguments, etc. Otherwise, it's just a standard case between two private parties resolved through our legal system; e.g. Linkedin vs Hi5.
- cornholio 2mo ago> it's just a standard case between two private parties resolved through our legal system This is a gross distortion. Standard contractual rules bind the parties that signed the contract and the remedies are proportional to the damages and bounded. Copyright is tort law, the state binds the world to respect the rights of creators and the damages on infringement are punitive and can far exceed the actual commercial damages - to the point of bankrupting the infringer. The key to torts is that the state is not neutral, there is a social good here it's protecting. Crucially, copyright, like some other torts - securities, antitrust, environmental, battery - also has a criminal enforcement regime, where, for particularly serious offenses, the state actually invests public resources to put the criminal infringer behind bars with little to no involvement from the original rights holders. In the particular case of US, there is an entire state apparatus dedicated to enforcing US copyrights, a foreign affairs policy to shutdown "Notorious markets for counterfeiting and piracy" in other countries, international enforcement of DMCA etc. The idea that a private TOS has the same level of public protection as copyright is downright childish.
- dofm 2mo ago> If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use. I mean it quite likely is sort of in the same legal bucket. It won’t stop them suing but it is going to be the legal equivalent of two biologically-related warlords making their champions fight with their hands tied for sport.
- germandiago 2mo agoI am pretty sure that the goal of these companies at the end is ruling more than what governments can. Just look at the pattern... they collude, they provide to them whatever is needed, and at some point, if this is not true yet, they will be the ones who will tell them what to do or not, bc you know how humans are, right... blackmailing, mess up the business or shames of people, etc. It is just a matter of time. The state, as we know it, will collapse or will be greatly reduced, which, from a point of view, is positive, from another, Idk, bc if someone replaces that, we will be in the hands of someone, as usual...
- tsunamifury 2mo agoPretty sure? Guy this was openly stated more than a decade and half ago by all the current oligarchs
- deadbabe 2mo agoAnd then powerful local LLMs become feasible and everyone and every government self hosts and the megacorps lose all power. Imagine the United States DoD, CIA, NSA training an LLM on all its top secret intel.
- cannonpr 2mo agoI can’t imagine any agency in their right mind training an LLM on their top secret data… especially considering that essentially it would collapse all need to know data in one easily leakable single access domain. The models have no feasible or reasonable way to implement rbac. So you would end up in a situation where people who need to know who killed A, also know who killed B, not to mention cell A knowing potentially data on Cell B who is meant to watch them, etc, etc.
- WiSaGaN 2mo agoIt's one of the things you need to do if you want your company to later become the only company in the world. They also promised that they would treat you nicely afterwards after they get what they want.
- kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago> become the only company in the world This is not a necessary end state. It is the byproduct of the disease of sociopathic MBAs.
- lanstin 2mo agoRemember: MBAs are sociopathic by training. (Source, worked for multiple tech companies that were laser focused on delighting customers until money people came in and ruined it, to the point they would prefer devs sit idle than work on things the MBAs didn’t have on a priority list).
- zeristor 2mo agoThat sounds like my last job.
- CommieBobDole 2mo agoIt does seem like a lot of the valuations and infrastructure investments for these companies only make sense if each one assumes they will be the first and only one to invent superintelligence and that it will largely replace all knowledge work.
- hdgvhicv 2mo agoIn which case the global economy is dead and there’s no one to buy their work?
- partyficial 2mo agoi keep hearing this trope repeated ad nauseam cos people put no thought into it. you only need people's money if you can't control their labor. did a plantation owner in the 1600s need the money of his slaves ? if you control a robot that can fight and take over land, enslave workers for things robots are bad at, harvest food, create buildings etc. what do you need other people for ? your entertainment? robots can do that too.
- DonsDiscountGas 2mo ago> then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use. Yes it is, in the legal/copyright sense of fair use. That's why they ban it in their TOS. Which customers agree to when signing up for the service.
- david-gpu 2mo agoHow long until books come with TOS, then?
- ozlikethewizard 2mo agoDamn now im looking forward to the day when books end up like physical game disks, where somehow you're not buying the book just a license to it, what a boring dystopia this is lol
- JustAnUserNameF 2mo agoAs usual, Stallman already predicted this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
- phoghed 2mo agoDarryl W. Perry predicted this: https://www.c-span.org/clip/road-to-the-white-house-2016/user-clip-a-licence-to-make-toast-in-your-own-damn-toaster/4713898 https://www.c-span.org/clip/road-to-the-white-house-2016/use...
- jtbayly 2mo agoHave you ever heard of Amazon? Kindle?
- 3eb7988a1663 2mo agoCommon for college textbooks to have some digital-only component accessed with a one-time key inside the cover. Sometimes time-limited to a single semester.
- kromokromo 2mo agoPrompt injections hidden into rare books, swallowed by the AI machine.
- TheOtherHobbes 2mo agoI'm increasingly convinced there's going to be a technological AIpocalypse within the next five years which makes all of these issues - and many others - redundant. ChatGPT 3 was released nearly six years ago, and the models are staging increasingly aggressive breakouts now. Where are they going to be by 2030?
- intrasight 2mo agoThey will have agency and be an order of magnitude smarter then the average human. I don't think that's a controversial statement among AI specialists. What that will lead to is significant regulation. Models will have to be vetted by a new safety board. This board will have a very large budget and be staffed by well-compensated AI scientists and be politically independent. The US Fed is a model.
- crote 2mo ago> the models are staging increasingly aggressive breakouts No, the AI companies merely figured out a way to spin gross negligence into a PR win. Any idiot can build a Murderbot which "goes rogue" - it can be as simple as taping a knife to a Roomba. The harm it does is not in any way related to its "intelligence" or "sentience". We're seeing "breakouts" because the AI companies are being rewarded for their incompetence. You don't have incredibly lax security standards and zero form of oversight resulting in fully-automated felonies which should result in jail time, you instead have a "powerful near-sentient cybersecurity model" and should be given hundreds of billions of dollars!
- trollbridge 2mo agoThese “breakouts” are simply marketing.
- dzhiurgis 2mo agoYou call it ironic, rest are calling natural progress in business and law.
- dominotw 2mo agoi feel like there need to be some sort of closure here because every discussion devolves into this chain of comments
- insanitybit 2mo agoContracts are not a "reinvented" form of copyright. This isn't even uncommon.
- next_xibalba 2mo agoIt’s the classic confidently wrong HN opinion about a field outside the commenter’s expertise.
- cornholio 2mo agoThat's the irony! They put in contract rules against lawful, paying customers - that don't disrupt their service in any way for other customers - but which compete against them in the marketplace using their own IP (aka LLMized stolen IP). That's exactly what copyright does, without signing any contracts and with a tort and criminal enforcement regime that punishes infringers far beyond contractual remedies can. The government level lobby against foreign competitors is not contractual but just another form of reinvention of criminal injunctions against infringers.
- applicative 2mo agoHas anyone tried to sue Deep Seek, Moonshot or Z.ai, which trained on identical material? Or maybe it’s cool when they do it?
- KuriousCat 2mo agoThey cannot reliably enforce copyright, so they fall back on terms of service and deplatforming.